The Long Game

It seems to me that several people have not yet woken up to the reality that Dr Who, to survive, has to go after a mass audience, and that mass audience wants human interest stories and neat packages that the Doctor has not delivered in the past, but is delivering in spades this series. I suspect Dr Who has never been so mainstream since the William Hartnell era. Yes we get the odd plot inconsistency, rehashing of old plots and not always brilliant acting by subsidiary characters, but hey, look back at some of the classic Who episodes and judge them against the same criteria most of us are using to evaluate this series and they just wouldn't shape up. Reading other reviews of this episode it is clear that you can't please all the people all of the time, since the things one set of reviewers have liked have annoyed another set.Perhaps that is no bad thing?

This was another episode that proved the value of the 45 minute timeslot. How on earth did they manage to spread plots over four or five episodes in the past? The action here seemed sensibly paced. Accusations that some scenes were reminiscent of "End of the World" seem to have missed how much there might have been a deliberate 'compare and contrast' approach. To give just one example, Rose in TEoTW was faced with a totally alien culture, here the aliens were conspicuous by their absence.My criticism would be that the whole setting was very Bladerunnerish, but perhaps that was more a case of homage than plagiarism? Generally special effects were good, and 'Max' was very well realised, except that I'm not quite sure what it is he did to kill promotees to floor 500 that left their bodies so in tact, you can't help feeling their should have been signs of poorly executed needle work on the re-animated corpses. the idea that people who get promoted have to leave their real lives behind would strike a chord with anyone who has experience of seeing colleagues climb the corporate career ladder.

I'm surprised Anna Maxwell-Martin's performance hasn't attracted more attention. No one seems to have picked up her role in 'His Dark Materials' with it's echoes of alternative realities, and complaints that her initial persona didn't fit with her freedom fighter background obviously miss the point that she was working deep undercover. I thought she was much more convincing, and likeable, than Christine Adams, who for me lacked any moral anchor.

I do feel that Adam's character was squandered too quickly, it would have been nice to have an episode where he appeared ambiguous before allowing us to make our minds up whether he was good or bad. Plotwise it also seems rather silly, because with his brain enhancement, and his time at Geocomtex he must surely already know enough about alien technologies to make a tidy sum.I wonder how many Who fans would have behaved just like Adam, and whether that was a point being made - the average fan would make a lousy companion.

Simon Pegg was fine as the editor, but it would have been nice to see a bit more motivation behind the character, and a degree of self-delusion. As a character he should believe he is doing a public service by propagating lies.

Nobody seems to have commented yet that the editor calls the alien Max, as in Max Clifford or Robert Maxwell. I thought the alien was really well realised in CGI terms, and vaguely reminded me of Robert Maxwell...

Nagging at the back of my mind is a feeling that time still isn't as it ought to be. Considering the trailer for next week's episode where strange entities try to correct Rose's meddling in time it seems the Dr is very accepting at the end of the day about events that have distorted human history. Shouldn't he be trying to stop Max's influence happening in the first place?